Joseph Michael Owens

[REVIEW] The Fun We’ve Had, by Michael Seidlinger

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FunLazy Fascist Press

168 pages, $11.95

 

Review by Joseph Michael Owens

 

It’s nearly impossible to imagine Michael Seidlinger’s pen ever stopping. He’s already published more books than the majority of writers are likely to in their whole careers. The key feature of nearly everything Seidlinger writes is that it’s almost certainly guaranteed to be different than the last book he wrote. The only constant in Seidlinger’s writing—besides the shining quality of the prose—is change. Indeed, the only given is that he doesn’t show any signs of stopping.

There’s often a feeling of uncanny detachment between the reader and Seidlinger’s work. It has a tendency to draw you in and allows you to only get precisely as close as Seidlinger wants you to, to see the work at a specific distance that he’s determined. Like an expert filmmaker, Michael Seidlinger is the writer, director, cameraman, and producer of these written scenes.  Continue reading →

Books We Can’t Quit: Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace

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PANK’s Books We Can’t Quit series reviews books that are at least ten years old and have shadowed and shaded, infected and influenced, struck and stuck with us ever since we first read them.

 

DFW

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, 1996

Little, Brown

1079 pages, $18

Review by Joseph Michael Owens

 

I submit that Infinite Jest fans have gotten a kind of rap. Whether good or bad, deserved or undeserved, the rap’s derivation remains up for debate. What’s clear though is that I.J.  is most certainly not for everyone: hating the book does not make you an inferior reader, incapable of understanding its brilliance, a douche, a simpleton, a minimalist fanboy/girl, etc. Likewise, at least in my humble opinion, loving the book does not make you a hipster, pretentious, a “snoot,” a lit snob, a douche, and/or a postmodern meta maximalist fanboy/girl etc. et al. &c. […]

Infinite Jest is ultimately a book I can’t quit, though I should probably mention up front that it’s not like I’ve tried or have ever had any real ambition to change this. Every reader has a book like this; a book that, for some inexplicable and intangible reasons, sinks its hooks into you in a way that few others can. It resonates with the fibrous strings of your core being. When you read your unquittable book, harmonies synchronize; connections are orchestrated between the page’s ink, the room’s light travelling at 299,792,458 m/s, and the relationship between your retina and the dilation of your pupils; neurons fire across pathways in your brain and . . . something happens.

You inhabit the words of another writer. Continue reading →